I'm trying to map art to a corrugated surface on a 3d shipping container I made in Illustrator. When I'm in 3D Extrude & Bevel Options: Map Art, there are 378 surfaces on my object. This makes mapping to one side of my object nearly impossible. I'm looking for a way to somehow merge or group the surfaces in such a way that each side of my shipping container is a single surface, rather than 100s of them. Perhaps this isn't possible in the current version, but it would make this feature a whole lot more useful to me if it was possible.

Do it the other way. Make the corrugations by means of gradients at the back of the artwork you want to map to the object and set the overlying stuff to multiply in the Transparency panel to pick up the light and dark of the gradient. Something like this

It will take a little experimenting and you can make several symbols to map to the different sides.

Hi Larry. Thanks for the workaround. Unfortunately, it's not going to work for my purposes. The scene I am depicting is a close up of a container at an oblique angle, so I need my artwork to look wrapped around the ribs. I've made an object in Strata CX and imported it into Photoshop.

Hi Wade. Thanks a ton for taking the time to make the video. You've provided a solution as well. The lesson that you and Monica have taught me is that Illustrator will see a single surface in 3D mode when smooth points are being used. I was using corner points. --jody.